3 ms·

Debian is definitely not a good distribution to test Wayland in its current state. A lot of packages are quite a few stable version behind, and the whole Waylan

by boudin 5y ago

Debian is definitely not a good distribution to test Wayland in its current state. A lot of packages are quite a few stable version behind, and the whole Wayland ecosystem is moving really quickly (for example, Gnome 3.38 instead of Gnome 41) Staying on x11 makes more sense unless using Debian unstable or testing.

rmrfchik 5y ago
I'm on Debian unstable. Giving wayland a chance once per month on intel and nvidia cards. It seems usable on Intel although many minor X11 habits are broken (like selection), but totally unusable on nvidia (black screen). X11 is still way to go, as 13 year in development is not enough for Wayland.
- boudin 5y ago
  Nvidia just fixed its driver this year, and it's still not in great shape. You can only blame Nvidia for that. We have quite different experiences I guess. On my side I just see that the recurring graphical issues that I had with X11 are fixed. Everything is super smooth, no tearing and really stable. Bonus points some of the side initiatives also improved a lot the ecosystem, like Pipewire.
- myownfriend 5y ago
  Currently running Gnome from a Wayland session with Nvidia's 510.39.01 drivers without issue. It's not Wayland that's not ready yet, it's the ecosystem around it. While the first commit on the Wayland git was in 2008, it's client and server APIs weren't considered stable until 2013 and then DE support for it only really picked up in 2016 since they were built around X11 from the beginning. If you were an Nvidia user then your options for DEs were limited to the ones that supported EGLStreams and you didn't get XWayland hardware acceleration or support for Webrender in Firefox until Nvidia started support DMA-buf in June of last year. Nvidia didn't support GBM until October of this year but it had an annoying memory leak which caused issues with programs not wanting to launch of launching as black squares. On top of that, the code that compositors and XWayland used to detect whether to use GBM or EGLStreams didn't work at first and XWayland windows launched as transparent so they needed to be updated. It wasn't until these beta drivers, which came out this month, that I'm able to do everything I'm supposed to be able to do in a Wayland session and the major hurdles in Wayland adoption on Nvidia have been removed. Kwin already removed it's EGLStreams backend because it never worked well to begin with and the drivers will only improve from now on.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Selecting text with left clicks and pasting it with a middle click is a major feature of X11 IMHO. As a developer I copy and paste text all the time usually the X11 way, because if I select it's already in the clipboard and Ctrl-C is useless. I'm using a laptop with touchpad so I don't have to move my hands away from the keyboard. If I had to use a mouse then maybe I'd use Ctrl-C/V. I also Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V files between directories in the file browser but not every week. I can also drag and drop them (move or copy). Everything other use of the clipboard happens less than once per month. If left click / middle click doesn't work between all Wayland applications I can wait until all toolkits support it or X11 is removed from Linux.
YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
I've been hearing this for years. I've got another machine with a rolling release distro (Arch) and it isn't any better. Until it is more mature I won't be using Wayland. It isn't just the weird bugs. It not being able to share and/or record my screen. Everything works fine with X11, nothing works properly with Wayland. For I know there is some way of faffing with it to get it to work but what I have now works perfectly and I see no reason to change.
- boudin 5y ago
  Screen recording and sharing works as well and it has been for a while.
  - YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
    No it doesn't. I literally tried every program I could find and almost none of them work with wayland. The only thing that works is the useless hidden gnome screen recorder than records the whole screen (and not a portion of it). Slack, Discord and a bunch of other programs also don't work. They work fine in X11. I can screen share a window in wayland but not the whole screen. I frequently need to share the whole screen (when teaching people how to certain tasks). The fact that I had to spend well over an hour trying to find something that works means it isn't ready. The existing software works perfectly in X11 and I see no point in trying wayland again anytime soon.

by boudin 5y ago

rmrfchik 5y ago

I'm on Debian unstable. Giving wayland a chance once per month on intel and nvidia cards. It seems usable on Intel although many minor X11 habits are broken (like selection), but totally unusable on nvidia (black screen). X11 is still way to go, as 13 year in development is not enough for Wayland.

boudin 5y ago
Nvidia just fixed its driver this year, and it's still not in great shape. You can only blame Nvidia for that. We have quite different experiences I guess. On my side I just see that the recurring graphical issues that I had with X11 are fixed. Everything is super smooth, no tearing and really stable. Bonus points some of the side initiatives also improved a lot the ecosystem, like Pipewire.
myownfriend 5y ago
Currently running Gnome from a Wayland session with Nvidia's 510.39.01 drivers without issue. It's not Wayland that's not ready yet, it's the ecosystem around it. While the first commit on the Wayland git was in 2008, it's client and server APIs weren't considered stable until 2013 and then DE support for it only really picked up in 2016 since they were built around X11 from the beginning. If you were an Nvidia user then your options for DEs were limited to the ones that supported EGLStreams and you didn't get XWayland hardware acceleration or support for Webrender in Firefox until Nvidia started support DMA-buf in June of last year. Nvidia didn't support GBM until October of this year but it had an annoying memory leak which caused issues with programs not wanting to launch of launching as black squares. On top of that, the code that compositors and XWayland used to detect whether to use GBM or EGLStreams didn't work at first and XWayland windows launched as transparent so they needed to be updated. It wasn't until these beta drivers, which came out this month, that I'm able to do everything I'm supposed to be able to do in a Wayland session and the major hurdles in Wayland adoption on Nvidia have been removed. Kwin already removed it's EGLStreams backend because it never worked well to begin with and the drivers will only improve from now on.
pmontra 5y ago
Selecting text with left clicks and pasting it with a middle click is a major feature of X11 IMHO. As a developer I copy and paste text all the time usually the X11 way, because if I select it's already in the clipboard and Ctrl-C is useless. I'm using a laptop with touchpad so I don't have to move my hands away from the keyboard. If I had to use a mouse then maybe I'd use Ctrl-C/V. I also Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V files between directories in the file browser but not every week. I can also drag and drop them (move or copy). Everything other use of the clipboard happens less than once per month. If left click / middle click doesn't work between all Wayland applications I can wait until all toolkits support it or X11 is removed from Linux.

YEwSdObPQT 5y ago

I've been hearing this for years. I've got another machine with a rolling release distro (Arch) and it isn't any better. Until it is more mature I won't be using Wayland. It isn't just the weird bugs. It not being able to share and/or record my screen. Everything works fine with X11, nothing works properly with Wayland. For I know there is some way of faffing with it to get it to work but what I have now works perfectly and I see no reason to change.

boudin 5y ago
Screen recording and sharing works as well and it has been for a while.
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  No it doesn't. I literally tried every program I could find and almost none of them work with wayland. The only thing that works is the useless hidden gnome screen recorder than records the whole screen (and not a portion of it). Slack, Discord and a bunch of other programs also don't work. They work fine in X11. I can screen share a window in wayland but not the whole screen. I frequently need to share the whole screen (when teaching people how to certain tasks). The fact that I had to spend well over an hour trying to find something that works means it isn't ready. The existing software works perfectly in X11 and I see no point in trying wayland again anytime soon.